Sunday, January 9, 2011

Another case of unintended side-effects seems to have hit with the Cataclysm green gear being accessible at L78.

I mean, we've seen this before, right? You can make the jump at L58 and L68 to the next zones and start getting the new gear and... Oh, wait. The new zones start at L80. You can get the gear off the AH, but the prices.... They make a Hummer look cheap. (Especially if you're leveling Tailoring and/or Enchanting, and you have to sink gold into those professions. Yikes.)

Hmm... Okay, you don't really need the new Cata gear to quest in the Wrath zones, and you definitely don't need them for the regular Wrath instances, either. It might make you feel more invincible running around in entry-level Cata gear in the Wrath areas, but it's not going to have that big of an impact, right?

Well, have you tried a 70+ BG lately?

I spent part of my Friday and a very late night run on Saturday getting pummeled in Eye of the Storm. Whether I was on Tomakan or Neve, it didn't matter. You could tell who the people with the Cata greens were, because their health and damage was way beyond what the rest of us were doing. It was as if Tom was was dressed in cloth armor, and Neve, well... I'm not going there. But it was absolutely ridiculous.

In the BGs for the 50s and 60s, that gear jump to the next expansion was there too, but the overall quality gap is much worse this time (try gear with iL150-160 up against iL278 gear). Tomakan at L57 could enter a one-on-one fight with an L60 tank in AV and have a reasonable chance of winning, but now? Even an L78 Mage in Cata gear outstrips our L76 hero in health. And with the only available remedy being the AH, that tips the balance of power to people with a big gold bank.

The obvious solution to this problem is to retrofit the entry level Cata gear to make it L80 and up, but with the expansion over a month old, that's not going to happen. Perhaps the best solution here is to take a page from Wrath BGs, where L80 was separated from the rest of the L70s, and move the L78+ into the L80's BGs. The result would be L70-77 and L78-84 BGs. Sure, it goes against the 10 Level breakdown, but that is a simpler solution than trying to retrofit something that has already been out there for a while.

3 comments:

I do not have any experience with this, but I like your idea of re-adjusting the levels to accomadate the difference in gear.

One PvP gear experience I just got to relive is the beating you take when you first reach max level. I know there is no good way to seperate those BGs based on gear, and you just have to stick with it to collect those honor points. There was my rogue, thrown into the big leagues, armed with PvE quest greens and blues, with a single piece of PvP gear from the honor vendor. It has been brutal.

@NaturalGamerGirl-- Thankfully, you don't need a boatload of PvP gear to do decently in BGs, you just need to get enough Heroics to level the field somewhat. I'd also stick with the BGs that have a lot of people on either side, like Alterac Valley. That way, you're just one cog of many. For my money, Warsong Gulch is the worst, because there are so few people per side.